While it is a commonplace that Central Eurasian ethnic identities were some of the Soviet Union’s most durable ideological creations, scholars have too often back-projected the self-serious primordialism of late Soviet nationalities studies onto the interwar period. As in many 20th-century nation-building projects, the commissars and artists who developed Soviet national repertories regarded the enterprise as high-stakes, but also as contingent, self-conscious, and even playful. Nancy Condee’s phrase “ethnic drag” captures the central role of costumed performativity in the cultural production of models for the Soviet ethnic citizen. Whether these models were “impostors” or “natives,” the gestures in the repertory of ethnic representation were always self-consciously affected and theatrical. That is, if among cultural elites (then and now), the “Eastern” arts are seen to be at the heart of Soviet kitsch, such campiness is not the preserve of condescending outsiders, but was interior to the performance itself from the beginning. This paper examines one prop that played a foundational role in the making of Soviet “ethnic drag,” a prop that also reveals that repertory’s Persianate background: the quilted robe of honor (khil‘at). Robes have a long history as a symbolic gift in the patronage ceremonies of Persianate courts and Sufi orders. Soviet cultural historians and anthropologists have long discussed the political economy of Stalinism as a gift economy, and at the mid-1930s Kremlin ceremonies that established the “friendship of peoples,” in exchange for Stalin’s supposed generosity, the Eastern national representatives’ counter-gifts to the Central Committee were usually robes of this same type. Following the gift (often accompanied by poetic recitation), the robes were put on by national representatives and Central Committee members alike, in an atmosphere of ironic play captured by stenographic transcripts of the ceremonies. Thick description of these ceremonies, gesture by gesture and couplet by couplet, provides the basis for a preliminary reading of the cultural poetics of Soviet nationalities policy, while the khil‘at permits a case study in Soviet official culture’s continuities and discontinuities within the longue durée of Eurasian culture.